Lessons - The Truth About Keeping Your Best People | Evan Sohn - Recruiter.com CEO

In this lessons episode, explore why traditional hiring models no longer match today's dynamic workforce and how on-demand talent solutions offer a smarter alternative. Discover how subscription recruiting streamlines costs and scalability, understand how video screening and curated talent pools speed up decisions, and uncover how gig economy principles and modern tools create a more efficient hiring process. Now what I find very interesting is how like recruiting.com is is feeling the gap that has manifested because of COVID, but it's interesting because you didn't come from a recruiting background. So I want to talk about the model that you implemented at recruiting.com because your brain and how you think through innovation and disruption, I think it's probably positioned recruiter.com, excuse me, to fill some of these gaps that we're seeing now. And I want you to walk through it in comparing the traditional agency like I don't want to name names because you're a good direct competitor with some of these probably, but you know the large recruiting agencies and why and why they aren't. Yeah. Yeah, totally great. So a, you know, fundamentally hiring hasn't changed, I don't know, ever, right? You know, you post a job, you collect resumes, you screen the candidates, you interview them, you hire them, right? That is the process for hiring. Whether you put an ad in the New York Times, you know, 30 years ago or you post a job on LinkedIn, right? That's how you got the job. Whether you mailed in your resume or emailed it or downloaded it or got to be a fax, right? Then you screen the candidates, you interview them and you hire them. That process hasn't changed and I think it's due for change and we'll deal with that two years from now. The, the, and the fundamentally there are two ways to do that. You either do it yourself. So Scott, the business owner will post the job, collect the resumes, you know, screen the candidates, interview the candidates or historically you hired a head hunter or a recruiter and the recruiter got paid 20 to 30% of the salary for getting that done. Now that made a lot of sense when hiring Scott was a kin to your, the rest of your career is going to be working for me. So I'll pay someone to 30% of your first year salary because you're going to be here forever. Okay, so 30 years, that's easy. 10 years, I could still amortize it. But what if you're only going to be at this company for a year? How in the world am I paying 30% of a salary for someone who may or may not last a year to, you know, a year to 24 months? So I think that model needs to change and what we started to do was to really capitalize on the gig economy from a recruiting perspective. And so you know what Scott, you actually need, if you're trying to hire people in your company, why don't you bring on a recruiter who works for you 10 hours a week, 10 hours a day, whatever you want in your specialty and let them do the hiring for you, but pay them on a on an hourly basis. And that's what we're delivering on an on demand basis. You know, you could hire a driver and pay the guy, pay your driver an annual salary in a bonus or you can go to Uber and say, Hey, take me from point A to point B, right? So, you know, you could do the same thing. And by the way, think of all the other models that are doing that today. You have upwork doing that and fibers doing it and freelancer.com is doing it. And by, by the way, we do that in our professional world, right? You have a, let's assume you have a bookkeeper or an accountant. Does that account work for you full time or to use an accountant that you pay on a project by a project basis? Get even more granular. You're doing the real estate transaction, right? You're not going to hire a full time attorney to do that one real estate transaction. You're going to find the right attorney for that location who knows it, whose license, etc. You're going to engage them for that assignment. And when the assignments over, it's done. That is where we see the the world going in talent acquisition. And we're doing that. We're capitalizing on this giant network of recruiters, getting them on assignments on a regular basis through subscription models, etc. And then adding the software to really make, you know, give them, you know, the proverbial superpowers, right? Give them the tools, you know, multi-multimillion dollar tools. Now, not just that. We're now able to do that from, you know, fortune 50 companies down to small businesses. So we actually launched a program called My Recruiter. You can go to start.recruiter.com, slash My Recruiter. And it is a full on subscription. Starts at like, I think a thousand dollars a month. There's no placement fees, nothing. You get a talent, you know, a talent advisor working for you to handle your specific job. And it's a monthly service. So it's a, it's a new service that we're offering. And no one else does that on the planet today. No, okay. So this is what you, when, you know, I'm reading through some of these, some of these talking points, the tenderization of the recruiting industry. Is that, is that what this is? Is this like the, is this like you're getting matched? Yeah. So that's going to happen probably next year. So right now, you're in a very, very candidate centric market, right? You don't want to do anything that inhibits companies don't want to slow that process up. They don't want to change anything right now, right? So yeah, the example I use in the tenderization of recruiting is if you are going to hire a comedian, right? You're going to hire a comedian for an event. You don't read, right? You're not actually reading the paperwork. You don't want to read the resumes of the, of the comedians, right? You basically want to say, you know what? Show me all the comedians that are available in my area at this time that are not wrong. She, because here's my audience, and you're going to get five, five comedians, and you're going to see 30 second or one minute clip of their comedy, and then you're going to choose that comedian based on which one you like the most, and you'll look at their paperwork. Because by the way, their paperwork probably also has the same thing. Oh, they were starring here. They won these award. You know, their resume looked exactly the same. Well, if you were going to hire someone for a frontline customer facing role, why go through the process of getting your paperwork, reviewing the resume that all looks the same, to screen them, to see what they are. Meanwhile, what you really want to do is say, you know what? I need a fill in the blank. I need this sort of customer facing role. Show me all the people that align with my requirements. Let me see a 30 second clip on who I want. And then, hey, I'm going to short list, you know, 10 of them, and then I'll go into the paperwork side of things. And I think that is going to expedite this overall process. Hey, by the way, you know, you know, the, the resume, the resume was invented by Leonardo da Vinci. And other than the font, and the fact we put our email and mobile number, it might not have changed much since Leonardo da Vinci. Since when is a one page, since when is a one page summary of who you are? You know, since when does that really make a lot of sense? I never does, but it's a way, it's a way to, it's a way to, so this is what I never understood about recruiting. I never understood how one page resume could encapsulate an entire person's professional life and personal life. And, and it just acts as like a screening tool when you have like ATS and all these other tools that look for these keywords. And then that sort of like filters everything out. But still, I mean, there's probably, there's much better ways to do this. I love this. So, so this has to be a better way, right? There has to be a better way. You know, it's, it's like it went from the personal's like, let's go put an ad up in the New York Times personal to, hey, here's my photo. Here's a little bit about me, but only show the people that are interested in me anyway. Like in other words, there's a riddy of filtering process. Why are you looking at people who aren't screened already? Like, why are you doing that? Why are you, and again, you know, there's so much data out there on individuals. And so the other thing that's really, really fascinating is, you know, if we're in a job hop, re economy, that actually means that more people are actually open to looking for a job than not looking for a job. And there's some statistics now of how many people, four out of 10 people are looking for it. You know, so the, does that mean that everyone is a passive candidate or an active candidate? Like in other words, it's, it's pretty incredible to watch that, right? That means that for the right opportunity, I can get you to leave your job because there's no longer any stigma. And by the way, I was talking about this the other day with somebody, imagine you love Charlotte, North Carolina, right? You don't live there, but you love it there. Why not work for a company in Charlotte that is, hey, Scott, you get to come here every six weeks. Oh, I love that. My best friend lives there. My in-laws live, right? So obviously, now we're going to leverage the hybrid environment to our benefit. So, so if you were going to, if you were going to set up the perfect recruiting process, what would, what would that look like? Like, if you could do it, if you could do it differently than the standard de facto way that we do it right now, what do you think that perfect process is? I think let's break it up. First of all, you know, I grew up in an either our world, you know, Sony or beta max HBO or Showtime, you know, now it's really a, or Mac versus, you know, PC. Now it's really, we're in an end both world, right? So there's no longer either or it's an end both. I think for customer facing roles, I would actually start with the video. I would, I would hands down, start with video, with data on the video and analytics on the video. And I would say, only let me just see the people that align with what I'm looking for. I want friendly, you know, friendly, friendly people with this experience, you know, who could do X and Y and Z and use. And that's really what I'm talking about with the tenderization of interview. And again, you'll start with something nice and simple. But by the way, you would say the same thing looking at a Java developer, right? Not a video, but like, hey, just show me the people that scored over 95% on this test, right? You know, don't show me all the people that didn't take the test. So hey, if you want to work for me, I'm going to build a giant curated pool of developers that have passed this assessment test because that's where I want to fish it. I don't, I don't want to fish in anyone that hasn't done that. So I think you're going to start seeing because if people are moving around so quickly, there's got to be a way that we're looking at things differently now. By the way, look at, look at, look at colleges. You're a little young that kids in college, but like the schools now, because it's so easy to apply to colleges, they're being inundated with applications. So clearly, they're using some sort of, you know, to think that, you know, that a school's looking at every single application that comes in, a reading every essay, like they're just saying, hey, look, anyone that didn't score at least this on their test or this on their index or read these words, don't even look at it. Just get rid of it. And one would say the same thing now. Thanks for tuning in. If you found this valuable, don't forget to hit that subscribe button so you never miss an episode. And if you want to dive deeper into this conversation, check out the links in the description to watch the full episode. See you in the next one.